


sharp-ears, the vixen

by still_intrepid



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Character Study, Female-Centric, Gen, Growing Up, Stream of Consciousness, discussion of romance, teenage feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-16 23:07:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21044303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/still_intrepid/pseuds/still_intrepid
Summary: Those are the pages of her diary she looked back at with a burning shame, later with a smile, then protectiveness.  A sense of injustice not for herself now but for all her past selves and other selves around the world.  All the girls thinking themselves fools and geniuses, martyrs and traitors, and totally alone.Some Czechia thoughts.  (Mention of Czech/Slovakia romance that never really gets off the ground, and that moment when Hungary is whoa very attractive what's this, but basically gen and a medley of young-adult confusion.)





	sharp-ears, the vixen

**Author's Note:**

> Something between drabbles and one of those old 50-sentence challenges, maybe? based on [this character meme/survey](https://nyolietpol.co.vu/post/186169247485/send-me-a-character-and-numbers-and-i-will-give). The items I tried to cover were _exercise, body, hair, personal grooming, security, jealousy, photograph/camera, kissing, art, temptation_! Working on how to characterise this wonderful gal :)

_Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.' I meditate in the bath. The water needs to be very hot, so hot you can barely stand putting your foot in it._  
Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'

-

She is not a teenager anymore. Some people see her that way, and she can probably pass for a teenager with the right outfit, but she isn’t, in any sense, anymore. Possibly the way you know this is when you _stop_ declaring you’ve grown up and figured it out, and start being a little sympathetic to your younger self. So she’s wary of declaring it but she has felt more secure these days.

Because, yeah, she remembers being – feeling – fifteen. It wasn’t so long ago. She remembers feeling alternately capable and competent, and a mess; _call me again when I’m a little more myself._

It’s not that this doesn’t happen anymore, but it doesn’t happen as much.

She remembers fifteen-fourteen-thirteen-twelve, and were those growing pains or hunger that felled her as she stumbled out of the truck to paint over road signs, and why out of the hundred plausible reasons is she crying?

-

She remembers Slovakia’s cheek smelling too much of cologne, and noticing at the same time how it was peppered with stubble, how his cheek and chin and nose were all angles these days, gawky and eager as she felt. 

It was like heat was radiating off him. He was so aggravating but she craved his attention. 

Those pages of her diary she looked back at with a burning shame, later with a smile, then protectiveness. A sense of injustice not for herself now but for all her past selves and other selves around the world, girls thinking themselves fools and geniuses, martyrs and traitors, and totally alone.

You feel like you’ve been the same inside, but then remember something like this and you feel startled and… you feel pity? But still not completely removed. Something like… a mother? It hurts your soul but you bear it with understanding.

-

At least once she figured, maybe she’d seduce him. It shouldn’t be hard, he was always following her around. Only it never happened somehow, and she couldn’t be sure which of them prevented it.

-

Fifteen, and narrating her every move — renaming everyone in her head and herself as well: _this is the real truth and without it they can’t touch me._

Attempted mental conjurations, prayers, fits of piety, (flares of real belief, joy, rage, transcendent love and forgiveness. It’s always harder to write about the sunshine, of which there was plenty too.)

— going on about her business with rivers and oceans inside her, revealing them to no one, putting on makeup like a uniform.

Sometimes. Well. Sometime it feels like the only choice. To detach, uncouple from the world. 

(Feel nothing feel nothing but see it all and forget _nothing_.) Poland knew about that. She said: _be a camera — _don’t look away. They stuff your mouth, but you refuse the blindfold -_ be a camera._

But you’re nothing special. A lot of people grew up in wartime. And a lot never did grow up.

(We’re _all_ special then, we all matter. Tempting as it is, don’t you ever forget it.)

-

For a while all she can countenance in her reading, in her head, is the surreal and grotesque: think of bodies but not her body, her body but not her self, her self but not her will.

_Romance stories_ are far more alienating and disgusting somehow. 

Anything tentative, gentle in potentia in imagination in that direction popped like a soap bubble at her first kiss, _their_ first kiss, when—tongues, thick, and awkward—Slovakia's _tongue_ in her _mouth_—foreign objects—

Give it time. Why does everything take time?

-

There were a number of years in which she seemed to always have bruises on her hips and elbows from walking into things. The gap between her self and her self… Her hips wouldn’t fit into trousers like she expected, and she didn’t get used to that jolt of surprise. She cut her hair with kitchen scissors.

-

Later: staring, fascinated, at the muscles in Hungary’s arms. Like something on a weight-lifter from the Olympics on TV, they literally glistened with sweat; a whole drop of it fell off onto the floor. Those arms, those muscles, the turns and curves and thickness of them, seemed thrilling and indecent on a woman, like something that modesty should cover. There was no way she was going to stop staring. The sudden, undirected impulse—the desire to hang, fluttering, off one of those great arms, like the cover of a pulp novel, or is it jealousy…?

Insane, embarrassing contrast: the smell of her sweat, different by a thousand miles to _his_: Slovakia, smelling of boy, indoor nervous sweat through the underarms of his shirt. Well they’d almost always been friends, and yet it took so long to figure that out.

-

These days she likes hanging out with the tourists sometimes. She’s on-call for a riverboat tour. 

America is still so volubly appreciative of Dvorak she can forgive him for borrowing the guy for all those years. Besides which he wrote her lovely letters home. 

-

And now she plays tennis. She feels gloriously spring-heeled, wound tight and released, unleashing all her force and intention on the ball, flying. Chasing every single one down and smacking it back. She still cuts her own hair, sometimes with whatever scissors are handiest, but aims for a vaguely horizontal line and doesn’t obsess over it.

And running — she runs for miles in the dappled sun, until the sweat turns to salt on her forehead, and cold water tasted, poured luxuriant down her throat and over her face and hair is the sweetest thing. Pure and potent as song, as the yearning [cello](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zBX4jAsDNo) melody, as blown glass, as the cool inside a church or the sharp sunshine without. 

**Author's Note:**

> the title is just a reference to the [Janacek opera/newspaper cartoon, The Adventures of the Vixen Sharp-Ears](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cunning_Little_Vixen) because... it's a cultural thing from there... and I like music.... sdfjkhsdf Also I guess mmm a little because it's specifying vixen and we're talking about how gender affects things here.


End file.
